3 Steps to Kick-Start Conversions on Your Landing Pages

Landing page conversion optimization is pretty hot right now. Speak to any marketer or online business owner and, chances are, you’ll hear them talking about tactics for lifting conversion rates.

With so much money going into driving traffic to our sites, it’s little wonder that more people are focusing on converting more visitors into customers.

Thankfully testing and analyzing the effectiveness of your landing pages does not require a big budget or IT help. Nowadays there are a slew of testing tools that make the conversion optimization of landing pages cheap and easy.

The trick is to keep things simple, use the right tools and, most important of all, systematically analyze your landing pages instead of doing twenty different things at the same time.

Start with your landing pages

Kick-starting your CRO efforts with landing pages—as opposed to any other type of page—has a couple of benefits:

Landing pages are focused on one specific thing and therefore get a lot of relevant traffic through existing campaigns, etc.

Landing pages are mini testing environments, making them a good place to start—and if you get good results you can replicate the changes you made throughout your website.

Fortunately, the whole process starts with 3 simple steps that give you all the data you need to know what needs changing and how. Let’s take a look…

Step 1 : Master the basics!

When you first start analyzing your landing pages you want to focus on three core elements first:

Call-to-action buttons

Forms

And, messaging

CTA Buttons

It’s a no brainer, but optimizing calls to action is crucial for lifting conversion rates. If your calls to action are weak don’t expect many conversions.

Specifically you want to be testing things like the position of your button on the page, your call-to-action text and colors to see what works best.

If you don’t have technical skills to quickly make changes, I highly recommend SiteApps’ Button Optimizer. Set up the SiteApps tag on your page (works just like a Google Analytics tag) and install the free app on your website.

Forms

Every landing page has a form. In fact, every website has them. Whether you run a blog or an ecommerce store, somewhere on your site a visitor needs to fill in a form to convert.

The first thing you should always do is test the conversion effects of minimizing the number of fields in your form. Usually shorter forms convert much better.

In some cases, though, you need a longer form to collect more customer information. In these scenarios, you should be setting up custom events in Google Analytics to report on things like someone clicking on the text box or hovering their mouse over one of the fields. Seer Interactive has a great post on how to setup these events to measure form engagement.

Keep in mind, the more streamlined your forms the greater your conversion efforts.

Next, take those valuable keywords and compare them with keywords in your search queries report from Google Webmaster Tools or Google Analytics.

What you’re looking for is whether the high-value keywords you want to target are showing up in your search queries report.

If none of the high-value keywords are showing up in the impressions column, you’ve got a problem with the quality of your traffic. Your page isn’t showing up for relevant searches, so the traffic you’re getting is probably not likely to convert anyway.

Solution: You now need to invest some time into optimizing your landing pages to rank for these keywords.

On the other hand, if your keywords are showing up in the search queries report but you have a low CTR, you’ve got a different problem. Your search engine results aren’t doing their job of sending qualified traffic to your landing page.

Step 3 : Analyze Behavior

The final step in assessing your landing page’s conversion efficiency is looking at visitor behavior once they hit your page.

The first thing to look at is bounce rates. Go into Google Analytics and pull out a report of your landing pages. Look for pages that have reasonably high traffic but also high bounce rates. These are prime targets for optimization!

What you need to do now is start diving deep into why people are not engaging with those pages.

Use CrazyEgg heat maps to see what people are focusing on or completely overlooking. Also leverage tools like usabilityhub.com or usertesting.com to get real life feedback from people to improve your page.

Step 4 : Rinse and Repeat

Once you’ve gotten your insights into how you can improve it’s time to implement the changes.

If you use a platform like Unbounce.com to build your landing pages, making changes should be easy. If you need to make changes but don’t have the technical skills to implement them on your site, consider a service like Elto.com, which specializes in custom website services that improve conversion.

Remember, succeeding at conversion optimization is about consistent analysis and improvement of your pages. Keep an eye on your landing pages, your traffic and your visitor behavior, and you’ll have the data you need to know what works and what doesn’t.

Repeat the process regularly, and you’ll see incremental improvements that improve profits over time.

Ivan Lim is the head of marketing at Elto.com - the curated marketplace of web development and marketing services to help small business grow online. He can regularly be found writing advice on growing online businesses via the Elto Blog or just hanging out on Twitter @ivanmelvin

Comments

Great post..!! Converting traffic into converstation is really tough task that I find. It’s good if you do this easily. You have no idea how important it ‘s for me. You provide me a valuable information that I really looking for. Thanks a lot man for sharing the wonderful post with us.

Agree with you Bhavesh,
Converting your traffic into blog readers is one of the difficult task but if you are able to get some good number of blog readers, it will surely be going to profitable for you 😉 . Thanks Ivan Lim for sharing the useful tips.

There is definitely no silver bullet to driving the maximum conversion. Lots of testing, analyzing and tweaking is required make tiny to monumental improvements… you just never know until you have tried. The tinest changes can result in the biggest improvements. It can just be as simple as making the site load faster. Amazon did a study and found that conversions increases by 1% for every 100 milliseconds the load time improves by.

Your blog is really informative. Analyzing visitor behavior is very important. It will count nothing just including every important things in your website and just siiting idealy.

Well, testing every element of your landing pages and getting back response of it, two of them plays a important role in rising up the conversion rates. Very well explained!
I would like to share one of my blog post on “tips to create effective landing pages”. One can have a view of it in the link given below:http://www.inkthemes.com/how-to-make-an-effective-landing-page/11/

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